“That pisses me off,” a former member of Todd Pendleton’s team said
about the iPhone X. “The iPhone X isn’t a great phone by itself. Samsung
makes the displays and a lot of the components. Apple still depends on
Samsung! I don’t know what all this Apple frenzy is about!”
Samsung was poised to earn $110 for every $1,000 iPhone X that Apple
sold, according to an estimate in The Wall Street Journal. That would add
up to $4 billion in revenues for Samsung.
“These are two of the largest companies on the planet, deeply tied at the
hip and directly competitive,” David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard
Business School, told the newspaper. “That makes this stand out compared
with almost any relationship you can think of.”
—
I THOUGHT THE STORY of the Republic of Samsung was finished, in terms
of this book. I was meeting old friends to plan a quick trip in Cambodia, a
country I once lived in and love. Shortly after leaving Cambodia for
Thailand, I opened my Facebook to frantic messages from human-rights
groups, journalists, and diplomats, who attached a frightening yet
hilariously untrue news report about me from Cambodia’s government-
aligned media. A photograph of me and the daughter of Cambodia’s
opposition leader at a private dinner appeared all over primetime television.
“Recently,” the Cambodian reports said, “Geoffrey Cain had a
conspiracy with the opposition party in South Korea to topple [President]
Park Geun-Hye by using the inciting newspaper articles to criticize her, and
also by employing social media as a means to spread out the information.
“Geoffrey Cain was also a spy behind an opposition party in another
country,” the report said, not naming this mysterious country. It accused me
of traveling to Cambodia to stir up similar shenanigans against the
government there.
Of course, I wasn’t a spy. The whole affair was ludicrous. But it was the
kind of strange episode foreign correspondents sometimes have to deal
with. And I could no longer go back to Cambodia. The Cambodian
government had just arrested an Australian filmmaker on trumped-up
spying charges and sentenced him to ten years in a Cambodian prison. (He
was later pardoned by the king.) My dinner friend’s father, the opposition
leader, was also arrested, for treason, and put in a maximum-security prison
after the fake news came out about our spy ring.